The Wuhan Flu and Its Media Allies

Dr. Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus response coordinator, speaks about the coronavirus in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, Monday, April 13, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Calling the Wuhan virus a hoax is a bit of a misnomer. There clearly is this thing called SARS-Covid-2 circulating about in the population. Like most respiratory diseases, it seems to affect the vulnerable more readily than others with “vulnerable” being those who are older, have a history of cardiopulmonary disease, and immune deficiencies. In fact, one can say it is sort of like the common flu with one major difference: it is not being treated simply as a medical/health issue. This is the first virus to be political.

One important aspect of the virus is that its reputation far exceeds its power. If this had stayed simply a medical and health issue, we had two early indications- Italy and and the Diamond Princess cruise liner. Italy is populated with the elderly. In northern Italy where the virus was most destructive, early reports were that 99% (not a misprint) had co-morbidities. More than 23% of the population of northern Italy is over the age of 65. There were two other factors that played out in Italy. The first is that their healthcare system is rather lacking. Second, there are 100,000 people from China working in Italian factories. The same trends were seen on the Diamond Princess where 19% of the passengers contracted the virus. The average age of the passengers was 58 with one-third of all passengers being over the age of 70. One can make a case that medical care on a cruise liner may actually be slightly better than that in Italy. Note also this fact from the AARP about the 2018 seasonal flu: seven senior citizens died every hour over one four-week stretch.

Taken altogether, there was never a reason to believe that Covid-19 was going to be the equivalent of the Black Death. The media knew it also. When President Trump was shutting down traffic from China, the media was too invested in discovering Trump’s latest “racist” act. The Washington Post on February 1st- in bold headline- told America to “get a grip” over the virus. Vox asked if it was going to be a deadly pandemic, then answered their question with an emphatic “NO.” Nancy Pelosi and Bill de Blasio were telling people to put their racism aside and come on down to your local Chinatown. As late as February 28th, Anthony Fauci said Americans did not need to change their behavior.

It is obvious that the media was not wrong back then. If we are to believe the statistics provided to us, over 80,000 Americans have died from the virus. Adjusted for population, this compares far less worse than previous pandemics and is less than the latest great pandemic to strike the US which was the Hong Kong flu in 1968 which killed, adjusted for population, 164,000 Americans.

Whether talking about the 1917-1918 Spanish flu, the 1957 Asian flu, or the 1968 Hong Kong flu, we did not run about closing the economy through state-mandated lockdowns while governors have discovered their inner dictator and trampled on civil rights to “flatten the curve.” We are not even sure if 80,000 people have died from this thing since we have “experts” like Deborah Birx admitting all deaths of people with the virus are attributed to the virus when the cause of death may be something altogether different.

Most importantly, the Spanish, Asian and Hong Kong flus of the past were not political. And we may just discover that the true mortality rate is no worse than that of the seasonal flu and that lockdowns made the situation worse. We already know those expert model predictions were spectacularly wrong. One suspects we will discover that 80% of the afflicted are asymptomatic or only mildly affected. We may actually realize that protecting the vulnerable while leaving the rest of America alone was the correct strategy.

But you will never hear a Leftist politician or their enablers in the media acknowledging their mistakes. Instead, they will double down on their policies and rhetoric. While the impeachment show was falling apart, it is simply amazing to see how quickly the media turned its attention to the pandemic. Trump went from being xenophobic to being criminally negligent and it started with laying the seeds of hysteria with exaggerated claims. Granted, visions of coffins in Italy and New York City is more “newsworthy” and provide “better optics” than hearing Alan Dershowitz debate Adam Schiff on the floor of the Senate, but the endless parade of horror stories and apocalyptic visions in the media scared and panicked the American public.

Panicked people do not make wise decisions. Politicians found that panicked people are also easily controlled. By early April, given the constant barrage of media stories, polls showed that 80% of people supported a lockdown strategy. Any politician would be foolish to ignore those numbers. Trump and governors were probably scared they would be blamed for killing people if they did not act. It did not help that Trump is a known germophobe being counseled by incompetent and possibly corrupt people like Birx and Fauci. As for Trump, it really didn’t matter what he did or did not do since he would get blamed either way such is the state of hatred of Trump in the media.

The timing of the media-generated paranoia played beautifully into the hands of Leftist Democrats. A vibrant economy had ground to a halt. Trump’s raucous, well-attended, and popular rallies were cancelled. They have, besides wanting to damage Trump politically, used the media-manufactured crisis to remove civil rights and proudly used it to advance their Leftist agenda. In some Leftist strongholds, people would rather see more Wuhan virus deaths than see Trump reelected.

Unfortunately, do not expect anyone to be held accountable for inflicting one of America’s greatest blunders on the country. Now to “reopen” the country, more medical experts have descended to create a system that makes it virtually impossible to meet the conditions they set forth.

According to John Hopkins University, no state has met the White House’s phased criteria for reopening. What a surprise! States like Georgia, Florida, and others are showing that the experts and the media were full of crap from the beginning.